du boisian double consciousness: the unsustainable argument • by ernest allen, jr

8/13/2019 Du Boisian Double Consciousness: The Unsustainable Argument by Ernest Allen, Jr.

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Ernest Allen, Jr.Du Boisian DoubleConsciousness:The

Unsustainable Argument*

It was in his essay Strivings of the Negro People, appearingin The Atlantic Monthly in late 1897, that W.E.B. Du Bois first

advanced the notion of Afro-American double consciousness.Six years later that same essay, slightly modified and rechristenedwith the title Of Our Spiritual Strivings, became the initialchapter of his newly published Souls of Black Folk.1 But then,immediately following that auspicious publishing event,Du Boisian double consciousness was put up for adoption by itscreator, sporadically commented upon over the years (mostly bywhite academicians), and then curiously redeemed by Afro-American scholars in the decades following Du Bois departurefrom this world in 1963.

The present essay is concerned with three main issues: first,

what, precisely, was Du Bois concept of double consciousness?Secondly, why did he choose to advance that particular notionin 1897 and then subsequently fail to elaborate upon it? Andthirdly, if it is true, as I argue in this essay, that Du Bois formu-lation of double consciousness was little more than double sleightof hand, what does such a conclusion imply for the actual exis-tence of an Afro-American double consciousness at the turn ofthe last centuryor even today?

The first objection to the above characterization will arrive,no doubt, from those who have misconstrued Du Boisian dou-

ble consciousness as a broad-based Afro-American culturaldilem-ma.That so many contemporary blackademics and others have

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shown themselves capable of misreadingDu Bois writings in this

fashion is, in itself, a topic worthy of further investigation.Subsequently we shall see that a general pattern of misinterpre-tation extends as far back as the World War I era.A recent exam-ple is Gerald Earlys edited work, Lure and Loathing, whereinmany of the essays seem to take for granted Earlys assertion thatDu Boisian double consciousness refers to a tension between thenationalist and assimilated collective identity of Afro-Americans, but where the concept of identity itself is conflatedwith culture drawn in broad, anthropological terms.2 Theproblem is that late 19th-century Afro-American intellectualswere already culturally assimilated Americans whose nationalist

leanings, when expressed in what we today would call culturalterms, mainly took the form of vindicationist histories extollingthe accomplishments of peoples of African descent. Undergoingexpansion during the New Negro Renaissance period, Afro-American cultural nationalism began to find additional expres-sion through the medium of literature and poetry.3 But a broad-based cultural nationalism anchored in the anthropological con-cept of an Afro-American way of lifeanticipated, to be sure,in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and Paul Robeson dur-ing the 1930swould have to await the outpourings of cultur-ally assimilated Afro-American anti-assimilationists of the

1960s.

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Although it is possible to conceive of an AfricanAmerican double consciousness in a broad anthropologicalsensemany have done so over the past several decades, and,stripped of its historical context, Du Bois work can certainly beread in such a manner todaythat is emphatically not howDu Bois himself viewed the matter. Rather, his concerns appearfar narrower, focusing instead on what he considered as conflictsengendered by (unspecified) double thoughts, (equally unspeci-fied) double strivings, (vaguely defined) double aims, and (com-paratively well articulated) double ideals, a subject to which weshall return. In late 19th Century America, however, there exist-ed no concept to express the kind of cultural conflict that many

of todays academics have tried to impose upon Du Bois earlierviews of the world. In the English language, for example, the

The Massachusetts Review

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term culture at the turn of the last century was overwhelm-

ingly synonymous with two concepts: what we would today callthe arts, and with the notion of individual cultivation ofbehavior, dress, and aesthetic tastehallmarks of civilizationand associated principally with the behavior of elites.5 All elsewas barbarism.And a moments reflection upon the overall valueorientation of the educated black elite at the turn of the last cen-tury will serve to disabuse oneself of any idea that this class wasburdened with a divided cultural consciousness framed by eitherof these narrow meanings. Sensing little cultural identificationat all with the lives of the mass of black folk, the so-calledTalented Tenth accepted as universal a set of values which by

the 1930s would be ultimately acknowledged by Du Bois,Carter G.Woodson, and others as thoroughly Eurocentric.6

Historian Willard B. Gatewood Jr. describes the overriding setof values that governed the behavior of the educated black eliteat the turn of the century:

Reared in homes that placed a premium on middle-class values anda Victorian code of behavior, they then often attended schools andcolleges in which white New England faculties stressed the samekind of virtues and pieties. The pattern of education found atOberlin, Fisk, Atlanta University, and Howard also prevailed innumerous other schools,black and white, throughout the nation; theobjectives, ideologies, and even faculties were strikingly similar.The

curricula devoted virtually no attention to the cultural heritage ofAfrica, but emphasized Anglo-Saxon or American culture.The edu-cational experience of the black upper class, then,conspired to moldit into a replica of middle- and upper-class white America. Its val-ues, style of living, and patterns of behavior, collectively known asrespectability and highly prized in the black community, bore aremarkable resemblance to those of respectable white Americans.Elite blacks were educated to take a paternalistic view toward blacksless fortunate than themselves, in much the same way as the well-educated, white New England teachers and professors had oftenmanifested toward them.7

The devalued status of Afro-American life within the university

curriculum was also remarked upon by Booker T. Washingtonfollowing his conversation with a group of some twenty-five

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black Harvard students:

...I found that through their entire course of training,neither in thepublic schools, nor in the fitting schools, nor in Harvard, had any ofthem had an opportunity to study the history of their own race. Inregard to the people with which they themselves were most closelyidentified, they were more ignorant than they were in regard to thehistory of the Germans, the French, or the English.8

Thus any suggestion that members of the tiny, educated eliteamong Afro-Americans were somehow torn between the valuesof, on the one hand, upper- or middle-class whites and, on theother, those of black sharecroppers, domestics, and other work-ing people (that is, as one might say today, between a Eurocentric

and an Afrocentric cultural orientation) is, quite simply, a propo-sition unsupported by the evidence.

However, despite the fact that the concept of culture as a wayof life had not yet entered into the American vocabulary, theredid exist at the time a notion of perceived group intrinsicalitywhich eventually came to overlap that of the anthropologicalconstructand that was the notion of national charactertraits.9 Western thinkers of the 18th and 19th Centuries com-monly assumed that each nationality or race (the terms werecommonly interchanged) was enamored of specific traits, gener-ally differing in kind from those of others.10 Echoing this senti-

ment, James Weldon Johnson, for example, remarked in 1900that the Negro and the white race, although they have the sameinherent powers, possess widely different characteristics. Thereare some things which the white race can do better than theNegro, and there are some things which the Negro can do bet-ter than the white race. This is no disparagement to either.11

And it is true that Du Bois occasionally drew salient contrastsbetween what he perceived as African American character traitsand those of the dominant American population. But he heldsuch differences to be complementary rather than incompatible innature,specifically rejecting the thought that any kind of warringincongruities existed between them. In Strivings, for example,

Du Bois spoke of:

the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the


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Negro, not in opposition to, but in conformity with, the greaterideals of the American Republic, in order that some day, onAmerican soil, two world races may give to each other those char-acteristics which both so sadly lack.12

Thus when in 1924 he declared himself in favor of what hetermed a sensuous, tropical love of life manifested by blacks,and then contrasted that quality to the emotional distancing of acool and cautious New England reason,13 such juxtaposingshould not be ventriloquisted to say that he considered sensu-ality to be a constituent element of some warring ideal-pair.Ratherand whatever one may think of such characterizationstodayDu Bois treated the contrasting attributes of black sen-suality and white reason as reciprocal qualities. Each group

possessed what the other lacked: the Negro would notAfricanize America, for America has too much to teach theworld and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a floodof white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has amessage for the world.14 A bridging of the gulf which separat-ed such traits would eventually yield a complex unity of oppo-sites.And since Du Bois failed to view the relationship betweensuch opposing qualities in an antagonistic light, it is difficult tomake the case that he envisioned black sensuality and whitereason locked in some kind of life and death struggle inside thebrain-pan of the suffering Negro.

Based on such examples of comparative character traits thatDu Bois detailed some thirty years after the publication ofStrivings, however, political scientist Adolph L. Reed Jr.recently concluded that Du Bois concept of double conscious-ness was an expression of his antinomical commitment to whathe perceived to be the Dionysian attractions of black culture andthe Apollonian virtues of European civilization.15 While therecan be no disagreement with the fact that the Talented Tenthembraced Apollonian virtues as a product of their upper-levelschooling, that very process of socialization, as historian WillardB. Gatewood Jr. indicates, tended to dispel whatever Dionysianattractions such ascribed black character traits may have held for

them. But given this lopsided Apollonian victory, how was itpossible for the talented ones to experience two souls dwelling

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in one? So much for the cultural interpretations ascribed

Du Boisian double consciousness, whether viewed through theoptic of dissimilar ways of life, discordant character traits, or dif-ferences in artistic production.

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The concept of double consciousness, of course, was hardlyunique to Du Bois. So many scholarly inquiries regarding thetopic of doublingand the divided self have been carried outin this area as of recent, that a brief summary is all that is need-ed here.16 One scholar who has helped to place Du Bois in his

Nineteenth Century context is Dickson D. Bruce Jr. Bruce,too,essentially replicates the error of Reed and others when he char-acterizes Du Boisian double consciousness as an internal con-flict in the African American individual, between what wasAfrican and what was American,17 But his identifying of thetwo main schools of thought for the concept itself, and of theiroverarching influence upon Du Bois own unique concept con-tinues to provide a useful introduction to the topic. In short,Bruce locates one of those sources in the literary traditions ofEuropean Romanticism and American Transcendentalism; theother in the psychological research of the period.

Whether literary or clinical in expression, the growing fasci-nation with the subject of the double and the divided self inWestern Europe and the United States throughout theNineteenth Century had mostly to do with formidable physicaland spiritual dislocations experienced by individuals at the handsof modernity: industrialization, urbanization, and correspondingcultural changes befitting new modes of social organization.Often drawing upon oppositional constructs inherited fromearly Christianity,such expressions might assume,as with Paul orSt. Augustine, a tension between the flesh and the sacred, orbetween nature and spirit, respectively.18 Or perhaps a themerather common to Romanticism: a counterposing of the quo-

tidian to the ethereal,of everyday life to thoughts of the sublime.Such were the plaints, for example, of Goethes Faust,wherein lie


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tantalizing suspicions of a possible forbearer of the Du Boisian

version:

Two souls, alas, reside within my breast, and each is eager for a sep-aration: in throes of coarse desire, one grips the earth with all itssenses; the other struggles from the dust to rise to high ancestralspheres. If there are spirits in the air who hold domain between thisworld and heavenout of your golden haze descend, transport meto a new and brighter life!19

Such Angst was comparable to the phenomenon of religiousmelancholy noted by William James in his 1902 lecture on TheDivided Self:mans interior is a battle-ground for what he feelsto be two deadly hostile selves, wrote James, one actual, the

other ideal.20 Ralph Waldo Emerson employed double con-sciousness in a multitude of ways: to signify a felt tensionbetween the individual and society as well as between the oppo-sitional pulls of fate and liberty (or necessity and freedom), and,in a more elevated sense, to signify the division between themortal and immortal selves of the individual. More descriptive-ly, he also spoke of the double consciousnessof dreams,as wellas instances when the man and the poet show like a doubleconsciousness.21

Widely differing concepts of double consciousness, antagonis-tic ideals, and psychic despair were all, so to speak,in the airat

the turn of the Nineteenth Century, thereby providing a num-ber of overlapping and sometimes mutually incompatible para-digms for Du Bois to draw upon while executing his ownunique take on them. Not only Goethe, but Emerson, James,Henry David Thoreau, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Eliot,and scores of other Nineteenth Century literary figures engagedthe drama of the divided self through literature or psychologicaldiscourse. Apart from Goethes Faust, one also finds inDu Boisian two-ness, for example,echoes of the internally com-peting psychic states in the medical model of double conscious-ness elaborated by James and others, where ones social selvesbecame separated from one another.22 But we also should

emphasize that in no ways might Du Boisian double conscious-ness be reduced to the content of any of its predecessors.

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However formulated, what all of these diverse expressions ofdouble consciousnessincluding that of Du Boisheld incommon was a sense of unresolved angst. Whether AfricanAmericans actually suffered a strain of double consciousness is amatter yet to be determined here. But it is essential to point outthat an altogether different and powerful source of psychic dis-tress in the souls of black folk could be found in a process ofmisrecognition, or disrespect encountered on a daily basisthat is,in the general refusal on the part of whites to acknowledge the

humanity of blacks. Some of the external prejudices againstpoor, impoverished Black Americans might even be justified, aconservative-minded Du Bois acknowledged, but the systematichumiliation black people faced on a daily basis was somethingelse again:

But before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this hestands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that per-sonal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humilia-tion, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynicalignoring of the better and boisterous welcoming of the worse, theall-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything black, fromToussaint to the devil,before this there rises a sickening despair

that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host towhom discouragement is an unwritten word.23

This despair was an expression of the anguish experienced byAfrican Americans who could not help but have internalized atleast some of the negative sentiments that white society heldtowards them. The perils of such distorted self-consciousnessamong blacks did not pass unrecognized by other educated Afro-Americans at the turn of the last century. E.A. Johnson, forexample, remarked upon the danger in teaching a race or anindividual to accept the estimate others may put on them. Henoted that the American system of treating Negroes has madethe Negro in many places think he was a good-for-nothing,and

he has accepted that classification of himself and seeks in manyinstances to appear good-for-nothing.24 Anticipating Carter G.


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Woodsons miseducation of the Negro thesis by more than a

generation, Nathan B. Young singled out for criticism thescholastic training of black youth:

From a tutelage whose spirit, wittingly or unwittingly is anti-Negro,many Negro youths return from college and seminary with despairsettled down upon their soula despair brooded in a partial, andoftentimes, prejudicial reading and interpretation of philosophicalformula and historical data.Their minds are stored with half truths,more mischievous and misleading than bold error. With these aspremises, they proceed to argue themselves into the belief that theirsis an impotent race, so conditioned and prescribed by a civilizationto which it has made no contribution, that it is impossible to formor to pursue any distinctive race ideal.25

Responding to Youngs analysis, Edward W. Blyden characterizedthe problem as one of false consciousness.26 The agony anddespair often resulting from such negative conceptions of selfbore a rough resemblance to the clinical version of double con-sciousness as well. But only Du Bois chose to characterizeAfrican American mental distress as consciousness divided.

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The question before us is how Du Bois himself defined dou-ble consciousness. But quickly we discover that our quest foranswers tends to be frustrated by enigmatic references, seductive

prose largely lacking in analytical fortitude, as well as inadequateexamples. Contributing to this evasive quality as well were themultiple expressions of Afro-American duality given attention inhis work. Between 1897 and 1900 Du Bois elaborated threealtogether different scenariostwo of which were ultimatelyincorporated into Soulswhere black folk were described asbeing irreparably torn between their Negro-ness and theirAmerican-ness.Take Du BoisConservationessay, for example:

Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it myduty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American?If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating that very cleft thatthreatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only

possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me tothe American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obli-gation to assert my nationality than German,or Irish or Italian blood

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would?27

Here Du Bois seems to indicate a fundamental discord betweena simultaneously held American national-civic identity and aNegro group identityhinting, without benefit of example, atthe existence of fundamentalpoliticaldifferences at the heart ofthe issue. Keep this example in mind, for it is one to which weshall return at the end of this paper.

A second configuration was to be found in the later reworkedand renamed journal article, The Religion of the AmericanNegro, which subsequently became Of the Faith of OurFathers in the tenth chapter of Souls:

From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro

and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenthwhile yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century,fromthis must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid senseof personality and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confi-dence.The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are chang-ing and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the sameway; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul,a pecu-liar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life,with dou-ble thoughts, double duties, and double social classes,must give riseto double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to presenceor revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.28

Manifesting a pattern characteristic of our next example as well,

Du Bois superimposes one type of agonythat of double con-sciousnessupon yet another: anguished feelings of inadequacygenerated during times of social upheaval. While the overalldescription is close to that of the preceding example, the seed ofdiscord in this instance is linked to rapid changes in lateNineteenth Century American life.29 According to Du Bois,such transformations severely undermined the aims and ideals ofAfro-Americans, if not their very sense of collective identity, butan identity already assumed to be troubled by duality. DescribingBlack Americans as being preoccupied with the issues of theirinner community life, yet broadly influenced by the religiousand ethical forces of the country as a whole, Du Bois comes

closest here to advancing the proposition that black folk wereexperiencing what we might denote today as cultural conflict.


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But although no concrete illustrations accompanied this depic-

tion of competing aims, it is likely that by religious and ethicalforces Du Bois was simply referring to his earlier invoked eth-ical ideals.

The best known of the three examples, of course, came orig-inally from that marvelously enigmatic passage of Strivings:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense ofalways looking at ones self through the eyes of others, of measuringones soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contemptand pity. One ever feels his two-ness,an American, a Negro; twosouls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring idealsin one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from beingtorn asunder.30

And because the Strivings essay contained the only scenarioactually graced by Du Bois with the label double conscious-ness, we shall be directing our primary attention here.

The passage in Strivings cited above contains a juxtapositionof two modes of purported psychic turmoil which Du Boisinsisted on treating as a single phenomenontwo agoniesdwelling in one, as it were. Here the source of internal conflictis unclear: does the disturbance in black folks psyches reside inthe internalization of contemptuous ideas which the world has ofthem? or is it rather to be located in sets of conflicting thoughts,

strivings, and ideals which they simultaneously hold? Let us returnto the first line of that passage:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense ofalways looking at ones self through the eyes of others, of measuringones soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contemptand pity.

This reference to looking at ones self through the eyes of dis-dainful others invokes the psychology of William James, one ofDu Bois Harvard mentors, as well as the phenomenology ofGeorg W. Hegel: the realization that each of us derives his or her senseof self through interaction with other human beings, through coming toview our individual selves as others see us, and that the refusal of others

to acknowledge our humanity or existence may trigger in us a sense ofapprehension or anguish.31 However, the peculiar sensation to

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which Du Bois refers could not possibly be the outcome of sim-

ply looking at oneself through the eyes of others,which is nor-mative to the intersubjective process, but presumably arises whensuch measurement results in a self-questioning of ones intrinsicworth.

Although negatedor distortedself-consciousness would seem afar more appropriate label, the initial process depicted by DuBois can be grudgingly regarded as a double consciousness ofsorts, in that consciousness of selfnegated, distorted, or other-wiseis established through that of another. But whatever thenomenclature, this form of consciousness should notbe confusedwith a much different process highlighted in the remaining por-

tion of the above, celebrated passage:One ever feels his two-ness,an American, a Negro; two souls, twothoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one darkbody, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asun-der.

This second section invokes an image of psychic despair compa-rable to that which consumed Goethes Faust.But there exists, aswe say, a perilous disconnect between the two sections ofDu Bois text: one the one hand, an anguish resulting from oneshumanity having been systematically denied;on the other, a tor-tured clash of thoughts, strivings, and ideals in the minds of

Negro Americans seeking to affirm both their American andNegro identities. The first stems from the refusal of whites torecognize blacks as human beings; the second, from their refusalto acknowledge blacks as American citizens while at the sametime holding them to the responsibilities of citizenship.Althoughthe second disclaimer is assuredly rooted in the first, they are notthe same thing.Yet here the resulting, distorted consciousnessandAngstassociated with one type of experience is haphazardlymerged with the corresponding anguish of yet another.This cre-ative and indiscriminate mixing of oranges and tangerinesallowed Du Bois to transform an acknowledged social prob-lemthat of securing recognition and concomitant self-respect

for Afro-Americans in generalinto a far more esoteric oneinvolving resolution of the supposed double consciousness of the


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Talented Tenth.Touted on the one hand as a phenomenon expe-

rienced by all Afro-Americans, the manner in which this doubleconsciousness became a problem uniquely identified with theeducated elite occurred by way of a second maneuver: Du Boisselection of a narrow set of examples to illustrate his argument.

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The conflicted double consciousness of the Black Americanwas, according to Du Bois, rooted in warring thoughts, aims,strivings, and ideals. But how were such entities defined?However specified, it seems to me, certain conditions wouldhave had to be met: a set of warring thoughts and experiences

anchored in the divided experience of being both black andAmerican; their internalization in the minds of Afro-Americansthemselves; and, finally, a torturous and eternal agony resultingfrom their irreconciliation. Only two areas of inquiry showmuch promise in this regard: the various definitions ofDu Boisian ideals which we find scattered throughout Souls aswell as subsequent publications; and a handful of examples fromthe first chapter of Souls illustrating the practical manifestationsof double consciousness.

Du Bois references to thoughts are much too broad to bemeaningful to any discussion of double consciousness, as are

those of stirrings. Du Boisian aims are also vague, but morelikely to appear in the form of concrete examples. On the otherhand, Du Bois also frequently invoked the concept of ethicalideals in this regard, which elsewhere in Souls he defined asbroad, pure, and inspiring ends of living.32 In the Strivingsessay (and delineated more clearly here than in the edited firstchapter of Souls that it eventually became), Du Bois spokeapprovingly of the ideals of physical freedom, of political power,of school training,of work,culture,and liberty, and of race.33

Expressly written for inclusion in Souls, its fifth chapter,Of theWings of Atalanta, praised the ideals of Goodness, Beauty, andTruth, of Freedom and Right, of Patience, Humility, Manners,

and Taste.34 There were also ideals incapable of expression undera single motif, such as, for example, the strife for another and

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juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of

knowing. And while lauding the Gospel of Sacrifice, Du Boisalso bemoaned the fouling of the Gospel of Work by the Gospelof Pay.35

Now, just where are the conflicting ideals? It is apparent fromthese examples that the highest black ideals envisioned byDu Bois were identicalto those of educated whites.And Du Boishimself makes this point clear in his 1905 essay, The NegroIdeals of Life:

If now once this great ground principle is fixed, that negroes aremen,an indivisible part of that great humanity which works andaspires,then what are the ideals of life that interest them in com-

mon with other men? To ask that question is to answer it.They arethe same.They, with all men, strive to know and to do, to organizeand to dream, to fight in that great battle of the west in the glow ofthe setting sun.36

But Du Boisian double consciousness was largely predicated onthe existence of conflict between ideals associated with beingNegro and a different set of ideals associated with beingAmerican.If such conflict cannot be demonstrated, if no warringideals can be produced, what does that fact portend for the exis-tence of double consciousness? Du Bois circumvented this littledifficulty by inventing what I have variously termed lesserideals

and compromised ideals: ideals in name, but lacking the moralauthority of his more frequently invoked ethical standards suchas Goodness, Beauty, and Truth.What Du Bois was attempting toaccomplish by portraying Afro-American double consciousnessas rooted in conflicting white and black ideals, it seems, was toinfuse the concept with a heightened sense of moral authority.But deep down at the roots, of course, this was not so much aconflict over ideals as a conflicted deliberation concerning theactual ability of black people to hold idealsthat is, a questionultimately turning upon the recognition of black folk as humanbeings.

Du Bois offered four explicit illustrations of conflicted double


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consciousness: the double-aimed struggle of the black artisan

to escape white contempt directed at the mass of black folk onthe one hand, and on the other to plough and nail and dig fora poverty-stricken horde; secondly, the dilemma of the Negrolawyer or doctor... pushed toward quackery and demagogismon the one side, and on the other by the criticism of the otherworld toward an elaborate preparation that overfitted him for hislowly tasks; thirdly, the conundrum of the would-be blacksavant... confronted by the paradox that although whites pos-sessed the knowledge needed by his people, the knowledgecapable of teaching whites (presumably that blacks too werehuman) was an unknown quantity to him;and, finally, that of the

black artist who was altogether incapable of expressing a sense ofbeauty other than the one revealed through the soul-beauty ofhis own race, a race which his larger potential audiencedespised.37

By reducing these examples to schematic forms one can illus-trate more clearly the dilemmas posed by (ostensibly) conflictingsets of ideals. Stripped down to their essentials, our four conun-drums would look something like the following:(1) avoiding white contempt / lending support to an impover-ished mass of blacks who regularly attract white contempt(2) engaging in acts of quackery and demagogy which require

no preparation at all / under the pressure of white criticism,engaging in elaborate preparation for complex tasks which willnever be consummated(3) whites possess knowledge needed by blacks / knowledgeneeded by whites remains an unknown quantity(4) as an artist, remaining true to aesthetic standards drawn fromones own people, the only such standards that one truly knows/ seeking recognition from a potential audience which rejectsones people and ones aesthetic standards as well

While all of the above scenarios seem to represent plausible,real-life dilemmas, the difficult question is whether they can beadequately portrayed as sets of warring ideals embraced by

African American individualslet alone ideals which crediblybear the mark of a Negro/American dichotomy. Save for the

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final example, on both counts we are led to respond in the neg-

ative.The ideals mentioned in the above examples include not only

the universals of Work,Sacrifice,Knowledge, and Beauty but thelesserideal of seeking white recognition or respect (characteristi-cally expressed in negative form: that of avoiding white mis-recognition or disrespect) as well as what can only be viewed asa compromised ideal: the embrace of quackery or demagogy.Theclaim that one is torn between competing ideals suggests theexistence of equally attractive alternatives on either side, and thedifficulty or impossibility of choosing between them. InDu Bois first illustration, however, one of the principal goals is

to avoid white contempt, while the other invokes the univer-sal ideals of individual work and sacrifice, and their implementa-tion in the service of the poorest, most contemptuously heldstrata of African Americans. So where is the Negro/Americancounterpoint? How can we possibly read this as a strugglebetween substantive Negro and American ideals? If the task ofuplift is determined to be the Negro ideal, how do we catego-rize the avoidance of reproach by whites?

A similar difficulty hangs over the second example.If Du Boisprototypal artisan somehow escaped the internalization of whitescorn, other abstract representatives of the black professional stra-

ta were not so fortunate.The dilemma of the Negro lawyer ordoctorconsisted of adhering to,on the one side, a compromisedif not benighted idealthat of shoddy and unprincipled serv-iceand on the other, in the face of white reproach, of work-ing and sacrificing to acquire skills which would never be put tothe test. But if work, sacrifice, or the securing of skills constitut-ed American ideals, did that perforce mean that quackery anddemagogy were their Negro counterparts?38 (Actually, if andwhere such negative behaviors actually existed, they likely signi-fied the end-collapse of a debilitating process rather than therepresentative dynamics which Du Bois sought to describe.)39

The third example was an observation rather than the repre-

sentation of a practical dilemma, a paradox centering on types ofknowledge rather than an expression of the clash of white and


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black aims. In a passage which might have been written yester-

day, Du Bois averred that the knowledge capable of teachingwhites (concerning black humanity) was seemingly inaccessible.But because there are no choices to be made in this example,one is forced to reject it as inauthentic relative to the issue ofwarring ideals.

Finally, there was the artist whose agony stemmed from a needto remain aesthetically true to the subject matter which he inti-mately knew, while surviving in a broad marketplace hostile tothe artistic values embodied in his worknot to mentionantipathy directed toward the real-life subjects he portrayed.TheNegro artists ideal expressed itself in the form of a commitment

to the soul-beauty of his people, while his American idealthe first of Du Bois examples where such a label explicitly cor-responded to its contenthad to do with securing the broadestpossible audience for his art.40

What can we conclude about Du Boisian double conscious-ness from the above four examples? In the first two, not only isit impossible to sort out which is the Negro and which theAmerican ideal, but Du Bois also has attempted to counter-pose his higher ideals to what I term his lesser or compro-mised ones, resulting in a diminishing of the exalted statusassigned their alleged conflict. Since the third example failed

altogether to express competing aims, it can be safely dismissedfrom consideration.Only the fourth, that of the artist, bears anymark of authenticity. But the dilemma of the artist cannot bepermitted to stand as representative of the dilemma of all BlackAmericans.Given such inadequate examples,not to mention thealtogether slippery quality of critical definitions, one is led toconclude that Du Boisian double consciousness was not so mucha usable concept as an exquisitely crafted metaphor.To appreci-ate that fact, one has only to contrast Du Boisoverheated exam-ples to more straightforward descriptions offered by other Afro-Americans regarding the plight of black physicians in the South.Hemmed in by medical examiners, beset by drug stores which

refused to fill prescriptions for niggerdoctors, regarded as rootdoctors by members of their own racelittle wonder,mused J.

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G. Robinson, that a number of black physicians had decided to

lay aside their profession and go into preaching! Claiming tospeak for the hundreds of colored physicians throughout thisSouth-land, an Afro-American medical doctor, T. A. Walker,noted that there was a too general belief on the part of a greatmany of our people, regardless of the fact that the Negro hasmade such marvelous progress in the sciences akin to that ofmedicine, that the high,dignified scientific calling of medicine istoo intricate for a colored man to master.41 If black physicianswere beset by existential agony in the late Nineteenth Century,perhaps its source might more readily be found in the respect oresteem denied them by the dominant population as well as by

their own people (the latter manifestation constituting a form ofinternalized white supremacy) rather than a divided conscious-ness on their own part. In any case, our inquiry now shifts to thereasons why Du Bois may have introduced this doublingnotion in the first place.

My sense is that it was for tactical, political reasons thatDu Bois introduced the concept of double consciousness intothe African American freedom struggle in 1897. In the face of aviolent suppression of Afro-American civil and political rights

and the imposition of segregation in all avenues of Southern lifeduring the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, black folkwere in the process of being stripped of fundamental vestiges ofrespect as human beings.Confronted with a sinister engineeringof signs and mores designed to fix the social and political inferi-ority of Afro-Americans in perpetuity, black self-respect wasseverely put to the test,with seeds of despair and self-doubt find-ing extremely fertile ground.

Acknowledging some of the deficiencies of the Afro-American mass, Du Bois envisioned solution was to place asmall-but-growing educated black elite in overall charge of thesituation.The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made

leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their peo-ple. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train


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men for it, he affirmed in 1903. But if such men are to be

effective,he had written two years earlier,they must have somepowerthey must be backed by the best public opinion of thesecommunities, and able to wield for their objects and aims suchweapons as the experience of the world has taught are indispen-sable to human progress.42 In the face of widely propagated anddisingenuous arguments proclaiming the diminished moralcapacity and intelligence of Africas descendants, however, theTalented Tenth itself was in danger of succumbing to a self-ful-filling prophecy.43

Hence the conundrum: in the face of implacable resistance,how was it possible for Du Bois designated leadership class to

achieve desired recognition as human beings as a matter ofcourse, without confrontation or begging? Indeed, if, in the eyesof others, ones humanity lacks self-evidential qualities, how doesone go about marshaling evidence of its existence? Self-assertionheld intrinsic benefits, to be sure, but at the risk of perceivedinsubordination to whites.To openly plead for respect, on theother hand, would be to effectively forfeit ones self-respect inthe process.But if my reading of the situation is correct, Du Boissolution in the matter was to tactically reconceptualize the prob-lem of blackAngstat base a despair associated with an assaulton the self-respect of allBlack Americansas one specificto the

Afro-American Talented Tenth.The key reposed in his discoveryof an ethereal but compelling malady suffered by educated blackswhich went by the name of double consciousness, expressing onthe highest moral plane the mind-wrenching clash of ascendantideals.The antidote to this existential malaise was white upper-class recognition and material support for the efforts and accom-plishments of this black educated strata.Hence if Du Bois inter-vention proved successful, the talented ones might be releasedfrom their putative psychic twoness, allowing them not only tooversee the offer ings of ever more Afro-American gifts to civ-ilization but, with the assistance of white patronage, to eventual-ly complete the task of uplifting the remaining nine-tenths of

the race.The eliciting of respect from educated and influential whites

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remained at the core of Du Bois overall strategy for Afro-

American uplift until 1934, when negative reactions to his pro-posal for a new program of black economic self-sufficiency ledhim to abruptly depart the NAACP.This search for respect hadtwo aims: by gaining recognition in the eyes of influential whiteAmericans, the Talented Tenth, thereby seeing its own self-respect amplified, would be empowered to carry out the task ofuplifting the masses with a greater determination and efficiency;what is more, the consideration of Afro-Americans in a morepositive light was bound to have a positive effect on social poli-cies affecting them in general as well as greater material resourcesbeing made available to its educated black leadership. On the

other hand, because double consciousness was already widelyacknowledged as a psychological malady among the learned, thetactical embrace of the concept by Du Bois also seems calculat-ed to elicit sympathy from educated whites, in lieu of an appealto their sense of justice.44 Moreover, the tactic held out an addi-tional enticement in that such whites could be called upon tosupport the Talented Tenth without having to admit their ownculpability in perpetuating or tolerating a harsh racial climate:who could be blamed for black folks having come down with acase of the double consciousness? Lastly, since the Du Boisianversion was also wrapped in the mantra of ethical ideals, a

request for assistance from educated whites under such condi-tions might be capable of raising the bar of respect even higherfor the unfortunate black victims whose consciousness had beensubjected to a debilitating doublinghere was a malady towhich only cultivated souls were susceptible. Appropriating19th-Century themes with which his white, educated readerswould have been thoroughly familiar, Du Bois wove them intoa narrative that established an ethical basis for black intellectualleadership.

If Du Boisian double consciousness had all these wonderful

things going for it, why did Du Bois effectively jettison the con-cept after 1903? First of all, the jerry-built form in which it


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appeared in Strivings was hardly conducive to long-term

occupancy. To expand upon the concept of warring idealswithout serious foundational reconstruction, would have beento invite visible collapse.This in itself would have provided goodreason to drop the concept, especially given the apparent factthat no one but Du Bois seems to have experienced doubleconsciousness in quite the way he described the phenomenon,or even employed the term. Secondly, educated whites unlikelyto be moved by accounts of demoralized black domestics orsharecroppers were being asked to find empathy with the psy-chological traumas endured by black people of proven intellec-tual ability.45 As Du Bois himself lamented years later: white

people on the whole are just as much opposed to Negroes ofeducation and culture, as to any other kind, and perhaps moreso.46 The hope of soliciting white acknowledgment of blackhumanity in the cause of racial reform appeared to be a lostcause.Third, there came to Du Bois the eventual discovery that,rather than continue expending energies to compel the recogni-tion of white Americansat least for the purpose of healing thepsychological scars incurred by racismtheir disrespect mightbe partially circumvented in other ways.

One revelation gained was that protestagainst unjust condi-tions itself, whatever the actual political outcome, tended to pro-

mote a healthy sense of self-respect among its practitioners.Thisconnection was perhaps best expressed by Du Bois in a 1913editorial.47 From the formation of the Niagara Movement in1905 onward,of course,Du Bois own protest activities were setin motion for the long term.Another revelation for Du Bois andother middle-class Black Americans in general, was that in afterbeing forced into segregated communities during the last quar-ter of the Nineteenth Century, they discovered recognition inand of themselves: a renewed sense of mutual self-respect, col-lective self-esteem, and black-on-black solidarity cutting acrossclass lines.48 Although neither outward protest nor the rise ofinner group-based mutual esteem were able to change the dom-

inant character of Nineteenth Century social relations or mate-rial conditions, they contributed nonetheless in many ways to

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the overall mental health of the race. Most importantly, in the

process of mutual recognition so necessary to identity formation,African Americans were not unilaterally dependent on whitesfor their individual as well as collective sense of self.And finally,at no time was the Afro-American struggle for social justice inneed of double consciousness arguments to make its case. Directappeals for justice worked just as effectivelyor ineffectivelyas calls for ameliorating the claims of double consciousness. If theabove reasoning is correct, in the wake of Souls publication,then, there was little incentive for Du Bois to prolong the life ofthe concept.

: - -

A loose end waiting to be snagged here concerns the originsof the pairing of the concept of double consciousness with thatof culture as a way of life.As noted earlier, it would have beenhighly unlikely for the juxtaposition of these two concepts tohave taken place either in 1897 or 1903 due to the fact thatanthropological concepts of culture had not yet bored their wayinto the disciplines of sociology and history, let alone popularacceptance. What was possibly the earliest reference to DuBoisian double consciousness in the social sciences arrived in

1914 in the context of a discussion concerning the purportedlydivided mind of the mulatto.The unique position and hencethe peculiar influence of the mulatto on all racial questions,wrote sociologist John Moffatt Mecklin,

...is due to the fact that the blood of both races courses in his veins.Biologically he belongs to both and yet to neither, and correspon-ding to the anomaly of his physical traits is his social status. He is aZwischending [in-between thing] ethnologically and socially.49

To illustrate this unfortunate dualism of soul characteristic ofthe mulatto, Mecklin served up the hypnotic lines with whichwe are presently all too familiar: It is a peculiar sensation, thisdouble consciousness. . . .50 Unlike later researchers, but consis-

tent with popular misconceptions of race at the time, Mecklinattributed double consciousness to biological causesa byprod-


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uct of miscegenation. Almost a decade later sociologist Robert

E. Park would invoke that same, later-to-be celebrated passage ofDu Bois, but in the context of Negro race consciousness asreflected in race literature. However, most of Parks literaryexamplestaken from the lyrics of the spirituals but mainlyfrom black poetry of the erafailed to manifest any stamp ofAfro-American duality.And unlike Mecklin, Park accepted dou-ble consciousness as an experience that comes sometime in lifeto every Negro.51 Absent from this formulation were referencesto the mulatto, to biological determination,or to any conceptu-al context invoking the ideas of ethnologists or cultural anthro-pologists. Parks emphasis in this instance lay in utilizing artistic

culture as a window through which social phenomena might bebetter understood. But in a shift of perspective toward the endof the 1920s, Park developed the concept of the marginal man,based upon the Jewish experience,whose spiritual distress wasto be found in his cultural duality:

a cultural hybrid, a man living and sharing intimately in the cultur-al life and traditions of two distinct peoples; never quite willing tobreak, even if he were permitted to do so, with his past and his tra-ditions, and not quite accepted, because of racial prejudice, in thenew society in which he now sought to find a place. He was a manon the margin of two cultures and two societies, which were neverinterpenetrated and fused.52

Around the same time, sociologist Edward Byron Reuterweighed in with a similar treatment of mixed bloods and theirostensibly disjunct minds, hedging the question as to the roleallegedly played by biology. And Park himself returned to thetheme a few years later with his Mentality of Racial Hybrids.53

Although far more sophisticated than the biological determin-ism of Mecklin, Parks formulation basically substituted the roleof a determinant culture for that of Mecklins biological forcesin the life of the mulatto. But Parks marginal man, mercifully,was spared the literary verification of Du Boisian double con-sciousness.

Meanwhile, the marginal mulatto thesis as applied to blackAmericans was given a catastrophic blow by anthropologist

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Melville J. Herskovits, who offered anthropometric evidence

that the majority of African Americans were of mixed racialbackground, as it were, thereby depriving the mulatto of his orher supposedly unique status with respect to the Black Americanpopulation as a wholeand thus to the white population aswell.Whereas the latest census figures had indicated that sometwenty percent of all Negroes could be considered mulattos ofone sort or another,Herskovits argued that the figure was invert-ed: only twenty percent of Black Americans might actually claimunmixed background.54 Misconceptions frequently die hard,however, and the publication of such facts in 1928 would in noway hinder sociologist Everett V. Stonequist seven years later

from linking mulattos and anthropological notions of culture toParks concept of marginality:

The person of mixed blood, by his dual biological and cultural ori-gin, is identified with each group. His awareness of the conflict sit-uation, mild or acute, signifies that in looking at himself from thestandpoint of each group he experiences the conflict as a personalproblem. Thus his ambitions run counter to his feelings of self-respect: he would prefer recognition by the dominant race, but heresents its arrogance.A sense of superior ity to one race is counter-balanced by a sense of inferiority to the other race.Pride and shame,love and hate, and other contradictory sentiments, mingle uneasilyin his nature.55

We sense where the argument is heading, and are not disap-pointed: The gifted mulatto Du Bois, we subsequently learn,has analyzed the problem in terms of double consciousness.56

Even E. Franklin Frazierwho ought to have known betterreiterated and reinterpreted Everetts double consciousnesstheme in a mean-spirited criticism of Du Bois call for self-seg-regation during the Great Depression years:

In the Souls of Black Folk we have a classic statement of the mar-ginal man with his double consciousness: on the one hand slightlysensitive to every slight concerning the Negro, and feeling on theother hand little kinship or real sympathy for the great mass ofcrude, uncouth black peasants with whom he was identified.57

And at least one scholar would continue to echo Everetts flawedapproach to mulattoism as late as the 1970s.58


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Misconceived and perennially misconstrued, Du Boisian dou-

ble consciousness had already undergone a number of creativetranslations by the 1930s. References to the construct seem tohave lain fallow until the 1950s, when historian Mary LawChaffee opined that Du Bois invoking of that peculiar sensa-tion described a generalized Negro plight. Her observationswere followed by those of political scientist Harold R. Isaacs ina similar vein.59 And in the late 1960s, at a time when literarytheorists were exploring the concept of double consciousness ina more generalized context,60 historian C.Van Woodward sur-mised that the reclaimed African heritage of Afro-Americansin the 1960s might give a third dimension to the tragically two-

dimensional man of the Du Bois metaphor. . . .The recovery ofan African past and a third dimension of identity, he believed,might have a healing effect on the schizoid two-ness, the two-soul cleavage of the Negro mind.61 Thereafter, under theindomitable pressure of Afro-American cultural nationalism ofthe 1960s, the levee gave way. Now almost everyone, it seems,was convinced that the Negro had been afflicted with culturaldouble consciousness since the landing of unfree Africans onVirginia soil in 1619! What was first conceived as a mulatto mal-ady by sociologists and lay persons alike was transformed by the1950s into a phenomenon that was said to apply to all African

Americans.What began as biological disposition and an internalwarring of adversative ancestral fluids ended as cultural scission:a frustrated attempt on the part of the Negro to balance twoostensibly different cultural realities.62

- -

Du Bois effort to postulate the generalized existence of anAfrican American double consciousness, and to characterize thatalleged schism as a clash between Negro and American ideals,not only fails the test of internal logic but that of empirical ver-ification as well. Post-1960s attempts to read Du Bois formula-

tion in the light of a broadly based cultural schism have fallen onequally barren ground.Having addressed both issues,are we now

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prepared to advance the claim that any discussion of Afro-

American double consciousness, whether in the context ofNineteenth Century life or today, is of dubious value? Not quite.

Historically speaking, the social foundation for perhaps themost significant expressions of African American ideologicalambivalence is to be found in the institutionalized as well aseveryday double consciousness and double dealings of WhiteAmericans. On the one side lay the conceptualization and prac-tice of egalitarian ideals which, purportedly without exception,applied to allpersons born within its bordersa birthright; and,on the other, the simultaneous conceptualization and practice ofa Herrenvolk nationalism where notions of citizenship and polit-

ical equality referred to whites only.63 The consequence was asituation in which many, if not the majority of Afro-Americans,simultaneously felt themselves to be a part, yet not a part ofAmerican society, virtual exiles in the land of their birth.64 Herewas an institutionalized encounter which might lend itself read-ily to a Du Boisian characterization. On the other hand, therewas no guarantee that alienation from or ambivalence towardsAmerican society would lead to a conflict between onesAmerican and Afro-American identities. All depended on con-ditions.

An expression of this conflict was outlined by Du Bois him-

self in an exposition which would have served him far betterthan the one which he chose as his representative model of dou-ble consciousness in Strivings. That was the passage fromConservation of the Races cited earlier, and to which we nowreturn.

Am I an American or am I a Negro?, inquired Du Bois.

Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon aspossible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not per-petuating that very cleft that threatens and separates Black andWhite America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduc-tion of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my blackblood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality

than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?

Not to be confused with some kind of abstract conundrum, this


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manifestation of African American double consciousness

assumed the form of a materiala politicalone with practicalconsequences. Facing a violently imposed segregation and sup-pression of their civil and political rights in the late NineteenthCentury,Afro-Americans had little choice in adopting an inwardorientation: fortifying their institutions, applying their energiesto community self-help projects, directing their resourcestowards racial uplift. For most white southerners, at least, suchactions posed no immediate threat to the status quo. But com-plicating the lives of those least in need of additional complica-tion, there arrived, right in the middle of the segregationist cru-sade, a nativist backlash to the so-called New Immigration from

Europe (and some concern even with the old) on the part ofAnglocentric white Americans. One of these prophets ofnativism and general doom was the Rev. Josiah Strong, author ofthe best-seller, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its PresentCrisis.65 Immigration was not the only threat to Americas futureperceived by Rev. Strong, but it was a central one: There isamong our population of alien birth an unhappy tendencytoward aggregation, he complained, which concentrates thestrain upon portions of our social and political fabric. Certainquarters of many of the cities, are, in language, customs and cos-tumes, essentially foreign. Many colonies have bought up lands

and so set themselves apart from Americanizing influences. But,according to Strong, even if the United States

were tenfold larger than it is, it would still be too small to embracewith safety to our national future, little Germanies here, littleScandinavias there, and little Irelands yonder... Our safety demandsthe assimilation of these strange populations, and the process ofassimilation will become slower and more difficult as the proportionof foreigners increases.66

Such expressions of internal solidarity on the part of ethnicimmigrants were similar to those that Afro-Americans werecompelled to generate. But while nativist sentiments such asStrongs were not directed toward Afro-Americans per se

(indeed, black people were not even a topic of discussion in thegood reverends book), they certainly posed a challenge to those

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of the race who perceived avenues for advancement in the con-

text of a separate group existence. What were black people todo? To be a true American in an Anglo-conformable Americameant alerting oneself to the potential threat which littleGermanies, little Scandinavias, little Italiesand by implication,little Africasposed to the proffered homogeneity of theAmerican social fabric.To be a Negro and survive ones socialand political condition,on the other hand,meant building uponthe only foundation permissible at the timeself-help andinternal solidaritywhatever the contribution of such efforts tothe further division of American society. Separate developmentscreated by European immigrants on U.S. soil were viewed as a

menace by the larger society; but since the very presence ofAfrican Americans was considered menacing to whites, similardevelopments mandated by law and otherwise for them wereviewed as a necessity. Nonetheless, queried Du Bois, if Afro-Americans opted for self-help and solidarity, were they not per-petuating the same type of cleft of which immigrants were beingaccused? On the other hand, had Afro-Americans any moreobligation than the more recently arrived Germans, Irish, orItalians to downplay their sense of group identity and corre-sponding group aims?

If ever there were an institutional basis for the existence of

two souls dwelling in one, this was it. However, acknowledg-ing the existence of objective grounds for the formation of aspecific form of Afro-American double consciousness at a par-ticular moment in history does not imply that every Afro-American individual felt the pulls of divided loyalties in the sameway, or even that he or she experienced any such tension at all.Much depended on ones class position, socialization, and per-haps even individual temperament. Ultimately there arose a gen-eral consensus among Afro-Americans that, come what may,progress would only arrive from a consolidating of resourcesinternal to black communities. But whether that advancementmight arrive by the grace of manual training and success in com-

mercial enterprise as advocated by Booker T.Washington, or fol-lowing Du Bois counsels, by cultivating a Talented Tenth to lead


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the race as well as oversee the dispensing of cultural gifts to the

dominant society, it would assuredly have to materialize some-day, they believedand with it an end to the separation of Afro-Americans from vital centers of American life.67

Two souls dwelling in one? Objective conditions frequentlyoffered the possibilities for such sentiments to manifest them-selves. Locked in a tortuous, eternal battle between onesAmerican-ness and ones Negro-ness? Not necessarily. If by dou-ble consciousness one implies a state of irresolution, of being sooverwhelmed with shouldering ones black and American iden-tities that prostration becomes the end result of the decision-making process, there is little in the historical record to support

such a scenario among most African Americans up through the1960s era. Double consciousness expressed in that paralyzing,neurasthenic sense would have been a luxury to most, an intel-lectual indulgence of the worst sort.68 But if, by the terms, onesimply means often being of a divided mind while facing prac-tical choices as a person of African descent, then sufficient exam-ples abound.69 Responding to the question as to whether hecould be both a Negro and an American,Du Bois replied in theaffirmative: we are both.Thereupon he voiced his whole-heart-ed support for Negro colleges, Negro newspapers,Negro busi-ness organizations, a Negro school of literature and art, and an

intellectual clearing house, for all these products of the Negromind, which we may call a Negro academy.70 And for all of thatsupport for things Negro, Du Bois felt himself to be no less anAmericanat least until 1961, arguably. Unlike his depiction ofdouble consciousness in Strivings of the Negro People, DuBois account of warring souls in Conservation of the Races,while crafted in a language no less equivocal, not only pointstowards resolution and a striving for higher synthesis but,with alittle work on our part, also reveals the concept of Afro-American double consciousness in a much more historically spe-cific light.

NOTES

*Revised version of a speech delivered at the Special Collections and

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Archives Reading Room. W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University ofMassachusetts at Amherst, on the occasion of the 131st birthday of W. E. B.Du Bois, 23 February 1999. I am indebted to Robert Chrisman, JulesChametzky, and David Lenson for their critiques of earlier revisions.

1W.E.B. Du Bois, Strivings of the Negro People,Atlantic Monthly 80(August 1897): 194-98;W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York:Signet Classics, 1969).

2Gerald Early, ed., Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and theAmbivalence of Assimilation (New York:A. Lane/Penguin Press, 1993).From the1960s onward, virtually every academic writer who has interpreted thenotion of two soulsas a broad-based cultural dilemma has failed to cite spe-cific passages in Du Bois that support such an interpretation.The fact that seg-ments of his work can be read as such does not mean that Du Bois himselfconceived them that way.

3Robert E. Park, Negro Race Consciousness As Reflected in Race

Literature,American Review1 (September-October 1923): 505-16.4Zora Neale Hurston, Characteristics of Negro Expression, in NegroAnthology, Made by Nancy Cunard, 1931-1933, ed. Nancy Cunard (London:Published by Nancy Cunard at Wishart & Co., 1934), 39-46; Paul Robeson,I Want to Be African, in Paul Robeson Speaks:Writings, Speeches, Interviews,1918-1974, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York:Brunner/Mazel, 1978), 88-91.

5See, for example, Raymond Williams, s.v. Culture, in Keywords: AVocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

6Carter G.Woodson,The Miseducation of the Negro, Crisis 40 (August1931): 266-67; W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro College, Crisis 40 (August1933): 175-77; Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro(Washington, DC:The Associated Publishers, 1933).

7Willard B. Gatewood, Jr.,Aristocrats of Color:The Black Elite, 1880-1920(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 270-271. Gatewood adds,

however, that Although upper-class blacks generally looked upon Africa as abenighted land, as did other Americans, this did not mean that they sought todeny either their racial identity or their black heritage.

8Booker T.Washington,The Story of the Negro [Extracts], The Booker T.Washington Papers, eds. Louis R. Harlan, Stuart B. Kaufman,and Raymond W.Smock, 14 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972-1989), 1:407.Despite a limited curr iculum, black students matriculating at Tuskegee andHampton Institutes during the first several decades of the 20th Century weremore likely to gain a greater appreciation of both African art and ways of lifeas well as African American folktales and spirituals than their counterparts atNegro colleges and universities. See, for example,Alice Mabel Bacon,Notesand Queries: Proposal for Folk-Lore Research at Hampton,Va.,Journal ofAmerican Folk-Lore 6 (1893): 305-9; Editors, Folk-Lore and Ethnology,Southern Workman 24 (September 1895): 154-56; Hamptons African

Collection, Southern Workman 50 (September 1921): 388-89; William H.Sheppard, African Handcrafts and Superstitions, Southern Workman 50(September 1921): 401-8; Linda O. McMurry, Recorder of the Black Experience:


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A Biography of Monroe Nathan Work (Baton Rouge:Louisiana State UniversityPress, 1985), 90-96.

9Such historical vagaries of language on the one hand allowed Du Bois toassume that the masses of blacks lacked culturemeaning self-cultivation andcivilizationyet, in the context of a definition of culture now available to us,permit him to acknowledge something of essential value in their ascribedcharacter traits.

10Often revealing strong racial biases, the idea of national character [espritnational, Volksgeist] received special attention during the European andAmerican Enlightenments. See, for example, the writings of David Hume,Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Thomas Jeffersonreproduced in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment:AReader (Cambridge,MA: Blackwell, 1997). See also Johann Gottfried Herder,Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1800; rpt. New York: Berman,1966); Richard Chenevix,An Essay Upon National Character: Being an Inquiry

Into Some of the Principal Causes Which Contribute to Form and Modify theCharacters of Nations in the State of Civilisation, 2 vols. (London: J. Duncan,1832); Ernest Barker, National Character and the Factors in Its Formation (New

York: Harper & Brothers, 1927).11James Weldon Johnson, Should the Negro Be Given an Education

Different From That Given to the Whites?, in Twentieth Century NegroLiterature; or,A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating to the AmericanNegro, by One Hundred of Americas Greatest Negroes, ed.D.W. Culp, (1902; rpt.Miami, FL: Mnemosyne Pub. Co., 1969), 72-75. See also William Ferris,Typical Negro Traits,American Missionary 62 (April 1908): 99-102; H. T.Kealing,The Characteristics of the Negro People , in The Negro Problem;ASeries of Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day (New York: J. Pott& Co., 1903), 161-85.

12Du Bois,Strivings of the Negro People, 197. A slightly different ver-

sion appears in Souls, 52.This sentiment was echoed by James Weldon Johnsonshortly thereafter:And may it not be in the great plan of Providence that theNegro shall supply in the future American race the very elements that it shalllack and require to make it the most perfect race the world shall have everseen? Johnson,Should the Negro Be Given an Education Different FromThat Given to the Whites? 74-75.

13W.E.B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk (Boston:Stratford, 1924), 320.14Du Bois,Strivings of the Negro People, 195; Du Bois, Souls, 45.The

term Africanize harbored overlapping meanings in the NineteenthCentury, including that of 1) biological amalgamation; 2); the demographicsuperiority of people of African descent;3) to cause to acquire a distinctive-ly African trait; and 4) to bring under the influence, control, or cultural orcivil supremacy of Africans. Du Bois seems to be using the term in the thirdsense.See, for example,Editorial Miscellany, DeBows Review27 (November

1859): 610;William H. Holcombe,The Alternative: A Separate Nationality,or the Africanization of the South, Southern Literary Messenger32 (February1861): 81-88; Henry Gannett, Are We to Become Africanized?, Popular

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Science Monthly 27 (June 1885): 145-50.15Adolph L. Reed, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought:

Fabianism and the Color Line(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 73.16See, for example,Dickson D. Bruce, Jr.,W.E.B.Du Bois and the Idea of

Double Consciousness,American Literature64 (June 1992): 299-309; JohnHerdman, The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: The Shadow Life (New

York: St. Martins Press, 1991); Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History(Oxford [Oxfordshire]; New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); MasaoMiyoshi, The Divided Self; A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New

York: New York University Press, 1969); Joel Porte,Emerson,Thoreau, andthe Double Consciousness, New England Quarterly 41 (March 1968): 40-50;Reed, W.E.B.Du Bois and American Political Thought; Ralph Tymms,Doubles inLiterary Psychology (Cambridge [Eng.]: Bowes & Bowes, 1949); AndrewWebber, The Doppelganger: Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford[England]: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).The

influence of medical and psychological literature on Du Bois is discussed aswell in Tom Lutz,American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1991), chpt. 8, and briefly by Arnold Rampersad,The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (1976; rpt. New York: Schocken,1990), 74.

17Bruce,W.E.B.Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness,301.SeeDickson D. Bruce, Jr.,Archibald Grimk: Portrait of a Black Independent (BatonRouge:Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 204-205, for a slightly differ-ent formulation.

18John Herdman, The Double in Nineteenth-Century Fiction:The Shadow Life(New York:St. Martins Press, 1991), 4-10.

19Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I & II, ed. and trans. Stuart Atkins(Cambridge, MA: Suhrkamp/Insel Publishers Boston, 1984), 30.

20William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; A Study in Human

Nature; Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in1901-1902 (New York:Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), 171.21Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. S.

E. Wicher and R. E. Spiller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966,1972), 1:161, 3:155; For a discussion of Emersons penchant for dualisms, seealso Philip L.Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History;An Examination of EnglishTraits (New York:Columbia University Press, 1961), 44, 50-53, 59, 134.

22There was also James consideration of multiple selves as mental illness,where a separation had occurred between ones social selves.Although Jamesdid not employ the term double consciousness to describe such maladies,others such as psychologist Oswald Kupe did so. James also developed a lessdraconian psychological model where, on the one hand, he described a dis-cordant splitting of ones social selves, and,on the other, formulated the exis-tence of social and spiritual selves within individuals in such a way that ten-

sions between these selves might also be envisioned. William James, ThePrinciples of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 1: 294, 399;Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois, 74.


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23Du Bois,Strivings of the Negro People, 127.Imagine spending yourlife looking for insults, wrote Du Bois in 1920, or for hiding places fromthemshrinking (instinctively and despite desperate bolsterings of courage)from blows that are not always, but ever; not each day, but each week, eachmonth, each year. W.E.B. Du Bois, On Being Black, New Republic 21(February 18, 1920): 339

24E. A. Johnson, The White Mans Problem,AME Church Review16(January 1900): 446-47.

25Nathan B.Young, A Race Without an Ideal,AME Church Review15(October 1898): 609.Youngs essay reiterates a number of points made theprevious year by Du Bois. See Du Bois,Strivings of the Negro People. Seealso Woodson, Mis-Education of the Negro.

26Edward W. Blyden, The Negro in the United States,AME ChurchReview16 (January 1900): 318.

27W.E.B.Du Bois,The Conservation of Races, in The Oxford W.E.B. Du

Bois Reader, ed.Eric J. Sundquist (New York;Oxford:Oxford University Press,1996), 43.28W.E.B. Du Bois, The Religion of the American Negro, New World9

(December 1900): 614-25; Du Bois,Souls, 221-222.29Helen Merrell Lynd depicts an internal dissonance resulting from simi-

lar circumstances, but without having recourse to the language of duality:Finding oneself in a position of incongruity, not being accepted as the per-son one thought one was, not feeling at home in a world one thought oneknew, can occur repeatedly throughout life. Sudden awareness of discrepancymay be brought about by changes in the social situation, for example, in asociety of great mobility where an individual may unexpectedly find himselfin an unfamiliar position, with the things he had taken for granted no longerthere; or it may come about through changes in the person which put himout of key with a stable situation; or through changes outside the range of the

more visible social structure. Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Searchfor Identity (New York:Harcourt, Brace, 1958), 37; see also p. 43.30Du Bois,Strivings, 194;Du Bois,Souls, 45.But was the moral hesitan-

cy of which Du Bois spoke the resultof failed self-confidence or its cause?31As James once remarked:A mans Social Self is the recognition he gets

from his mates. . . . No more fiendish punishment could be devised,were sucha thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society andremain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof.William James, ThePrinciples of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 1:293.And asHegel noted in one of his celebrated passages, Self-consciousness exists inand for itself when,and by the fact that, it so exists for another;that is, it existsonly in being acknowledged. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,Phenomenology of Spirit, trans.A.V.Miller (Oxford:Clarendon Press,1977),111.

32Du Bois, Souls, 119.

33Du Bois, Souls, 197.34Several decades later he again referred to the aesthetic ideals of Beauty,Truth, and Goodness. W.E.B. Du Bois, Criteria of Negro Art, Crisis 32

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(October 1926): 296.35Du Bois, Souls, 111-12, 114, 117-18. In Souls as well, but without specif-

ically mentioning ideals as such, Du Bois referred to values of good, thebeautiful, and the true, as well as those of Justice, Mercy, and Truth. In his1905 article,The Negro Ideals of Life, he once again touted the elevatedvalues of Work and Sacrifice. In 1917 he referred to religious ideals, and tomore mundane matters of honor and fairness. Du Bois, Souls, 188, 256; DuBois, The Negro Ideals of Life, Christian Register84 (October 26, 1905):1199; Du Bois,Of the Culture of White Folk,Journal of Race Development 7(April 1917): 435.

36Du Bois,Negro Ideals of Life, 1198-99.He also made it clear that suchideals were never static, but in a continual state of change. Du Bois,Souls,113.

37Du Bois, Souls, 195.38In the revised version of this example appearing in Souls, the figure of

the lawyer was replaced by the minister, and the dilemma faced by minister

and doctor was described as a temptation toward debased ideals of quackeryand demagogy on the one side, and on the other (due to the criticism ofthe other world) an equal penchant toward [high] ideals that made himashamed of his lowly tasks. Du Bois, Souls, 46.

39While offering some clarification, the revision failed to constitute awholly redemptive improvement over the original.The tarnished Negro idealremained, with the competing American ideal now only implied, save for thenegative results which it purportedly induced in the self-esteem of its sub-scribers. Nonetheless, this example is open to at least another reading. It mayhave been that Du Boisminister and doctor sought to avoid serious work andsacrifice for what they deemed to be a lowly cause (a sentiment which foundreinforcement in the attitudes of educated whites), while evincing preferencefor service much more in keeping with their abilities and training. Ratherthan constituting antithetical ideals, however, these were complementary aims

characterized by a repulsive force at one pole, an attractive one at the other.40To belabor an important point, this artists dilemma offers the clearestexample why the struggle between two ideals cannot be construed as a strug-gle between cultures reflected in a single mind.There are two sets of aesthet-ic values involved, but Du Bois artist is not torn between them.That is, hewas not torn between American and Negro ideals, but between holding ontoand expressing African American aesthetic ideals in his work while at thesame time gaining recognition for them from whites. By the 1940s, abstractart offered black artists such as Hale Woodruff, Rose Piper,Romare Bearden,and Norman Lewis a means of granting the universal to abstracted ances-tral imagery without succumbing to the racialization of recognizably Africanor African American images. Ann Gibson, Two Worlds: African AmericanAbstraction in New York at Mid-Century, The Search for Freedom: AfricanAmerican Abstract Painting 1945-1975(New York: Kenelkeba Gallery, 1991),

37. I am indebted to Lauren Hazel for this citation.41J. G. Robinson, Africa and the Educated and Wealthy Negroes ofAmerica,AME Church Review10 (July 1893): 161-62;T. A.Walker,Race


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Confidence and Race Unity,AME Church Review6 (July 1889): 54.42W.E.B. Du Bois, The Talented Tenth, in The Negro Problem;A Series of

Articles by Representative American Negroes of To-Day (New York: J. Pott & Co.,1903), 75; Du Bois, The Relation of the Negroes to the Whites in theSouth,Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science18 (July1901): 128. Interestingly, in the latter essay, and unlike his later appeal to dou-ble consciousness,Du Bois made requested support from the better class inthe context ofjusticein this case, promoting a fairer economic system inthe South. The term Talented Tenth was coined by the Rev. HenryMorehouse in 1896. See Henry L. Morehouse, The Talented Tenth,Independent 48 (April 23, 1896): 1.

43For vivid examples of such ideas, see George M.Fredrickson,Black Imagein the White Mind:The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); John S. Haller, Jr., Outcasts FromEvolution;Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859-1900(Urbana:University

of Illinois Press, 1971); John G. Mencke, Mulattoes and Race Mixture:AmericanAttitudes and Images, 1865-1918(Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1979).44But here was a call for sympathy unencumbered by the erosion of self

respect that might otherwise have occurred had Du Bois merely registered asimple plea that blacks be recognized as human beings. (I have in mind thesincere but pitiable inscriptions on Josiah Wedgwoods famous anti-slaverymedal:Am I not a man and a brother?) Respect can be effectively demand-ed, though not necessarily reciprocated, but to solicit respect under the guiseof sympathy is to undermine self-respect.

45There is the example of Du Bois first and failed discussion with a whitesoutherner in the South itself. See William M.Tuttle, Jr., W.E.B. Du BoisConfrontation With White Liberalism During the Progressive Era:A PhylonDocument, Phylon 35 (September 1974): 241-58.

46W.E.B. Du Bois, The Anti-Segregation Campaign, Crisis 41 (June

1934): 182.47W.E.B. Du Bois,A Philosophy for 1913, Crisis 5 (January 1913): 127;see also Bernard R. Boxill,Self-Respect, in Blacks and Social Justice(1984;rvsd. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), 186-204.

48Du Bois himself offered the example of his grandfathers changing atti-tudes towards socialization with other Afro-Americans. W.E.B.Du Bois,OnBeing Ashamed of Oneself: An Essay on Race Pride, Crisis 40 (September1933): 199-200. See also August Meier,Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915;Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T.Washington (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1963),passim.

49John Moffatt Mecklin,Democracy and Race Friction;A Study in Social Ethics(New York: Macmillan, 1914), 153.

50Mecklin, Democracy and Race Friction, 155.51Robert E. Park, Negro Race Consciousness As Reflected in Race

Literature,American Review1 (September-October 1923): 510.52Robert E. Park,Human Migration and the Marginal Man,AmericanJournal of Sociology 33 (May 1928):892.

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53E. B. Reuter,The Personality of Mixed Bloods, Papers and Proceedings,22d Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society 22 (1928): 52-59; E. B.Reuter, The American Mulatto,Annals of the American Academy of Politicaland Social Science140 (November 1928): 36-43; Robert E. Park,Mentality ofRacial Hybrids,American Journal of Sociology 36 (January 1931): 534-51.

54Melville J. Herskovits, The American Negro; A Study in Racial Crossing(New York:A.A. Knopf, 1928), 4-5,10; James B.McKee,Sociology and the RaceProblem:The Failure of a Perspective(Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1993),84.

55Everett V. Stonequist, The Problem of the Marginal Man, AmericanJournal of Sociology 41 (July 1935): 6.

56Stonequist, The Problem of the Marginal Man, 6; see also Everett V.Stonequist, The Marginal Man;A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New

York; Chicago:C. Scribners Sons, 1937), 25-26.57E. Franklin Frazier,The Du Bois Program in the Present Crisis, Race1

(Winter 1935-1936): 12.58Mencke, Mulattoes and Race Mixture, 160-61.59Mary Law Chaffee, William E. B. Dubois Concept of the Racial

Problem in the United States: The Early Negro Educational Movement,Journal of Negro History 41 (July 1956): 258; Harold R. Isaacs,The AmericanNegro and Africa: Some Notes, Phylon 20 (Fa

du boisian double consciousness: the unsustainable argument • by ernest allen, jr

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